Innholdsfortegnelse for January 23, 2023 i The New Yorker

One of them is still there, in the smell of burnt toastand dirty clothes that was my twenties, always waitingto be picked up outside some station, that tendernessset against each building’s law of metal and stone. One of them is still on a slope of the Sandias,jeans pushed down to his kneesso I can pick out the cactus needles from his thigh.The sky is late, the color of grape soda. In weeks, he will goto a war, write letters that now sleep in a boxin the basement, next to a box of Christmas ornaments. I open a book I read in collegeand one of them is in the margins, his handwritingan enthusiastic vine, like the vines at the edgesof medieval texts, each “O” of his cursive a tiny horse chestnut,the…

Winter’s revelation is always the same:longing.A flamingo flies overheada pink axe cutting through the sky.I think of Tony Montanaalone in his hot tubhis world and everything in iton the cusp of collapse,watching a nature documentaryseeing the flamingos taking flightand yelling “Pelican, fly!”I think of Florida. I think of home.The haters will say the bird you seeabove is simply a spoonbill, butthey’re just trying to bring you down, man.I think of seeing flamingos onlyon lottery billboards. A good omen.I think of how Baton Rougewas once a part of West Florida.I think of how nothing escapesthe swamp’s reclamation.I think of Charles Mortonwho thought birds flewto the moon for winter.We all have moonswe long to return to.I watch the flamingo.I watch until it fadesinto the pink of sunsetuntil it becomeswhat is missing.…

UNMASKED Emma Green’s piece about the People’s C.D.C. is a snarky account of a group of community-minded health-care advocates who believe that the C.D.C. and the White House have failed in their responsibility to protect people from COVID (Annals of Activism, December 28th, www.newyorker.com/green-on-peoples-cdc).The author’s efforts to belittle (“ragtag coalition”) or Red-bait (“those people”) groups that are simply trying to sound the alarm are not helpful. A fair-minded article might have looked at the morbidity and mortality numbers, and tried to explain what we could have done differently, and why we have become willing to accept so much illness and death. Susan M. Reverby Boston, Mass. TWO SIDES OF MAILER David Denby makes a compelling case for a Norman Mailer revival (A Critic at Large, December 26th). Although Mailer is…

A crime wave can be a boon to the A media—dramatic content, urgent headlines. The other afternoon, in lower Manhattan, Gersh Kuntzman, the former Post and Daily News columnist, who now runs Streetsblog NYC, set out to document a crime wave of his own making. He slipped on fluorescent gloves and mounted his silver-and-lime bike, which was covered with stickers (“FUCK CARS”) and outfitted with a black pannier. Inside: paper towels and a blue acrylic paint pen. The goal: to restore license plates whose numbers had been intentionally obscured, a common, illegal tactic employed by drivers looking to evade the city’s speeding-ticket cameras. The restoration work was not exactly legal, either. Kuntzman held up a lanyard. “I always have my press pass,” he said, “just in case we get into…

For the first eight years of her life as an artist, Tala Madani, who was born in Tehran, painted only men, and not to their credit. “Caked,” in 2005, shows a brawny, nearly featureless oaf in a black undershirt smashing a cake in another oaf’s face. Next came a series of small paintings of men with plants growing out of their crotch—one of them tends to his foliage with a watering can. In 2011, she painted several men whose testicles hung from their chin, and a man in spirited conversation with his vital organs, which have been removed and placed in a comfortable chair. A series of 2015 paintings present men whose colossal, firehose penises take on lives of their own. None of these images suggest animosity toward the male…

Balmoral Castle, in the Scottish Highlands, was Queen Elizabeth’s preferred resort among her several castles and palaces, and in the opening pages of “Spare” (Random House), the much anticipated, luridly leaked, and compellingly artful autobiography of Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, its environs are intimately described. We get the redcoated footman attending the heavy front door; the mackintoshes hanging on hooks; the cream-and-gold wallpaper; and the statue of Queen Victoria, to which Harry and his older brother, William, always bowed when passing. Beyond lay the castle’s fifty bedrooms—including the one known in the brothers’ childhood as the nursery, unequally divided into two. William occupied the larger half, with a double bed and a splendid view; Harry’s portion was more modest, with a bed frame too high for a child…

E. M. Forster’s friends tried more than once to persuade him to publish “Maurice.” The novel, which he wrote when he was thirty-five, moldered in a drawer for decades afterward, with a note attached that read, “Publishable. But worth it?” In other words, was it worth the risk to career, friendships, and family for someone with his literary reputation and social standing to publish a novel whose main character was an “unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort”? “I am ashamed at shirking publication,” he told Christopher Isherwood, “but the objections are formidable.” One friend put it to him that the French writer André Gide’s memoirs made no secret of his homosexuality. “Gide hasn’t got a mother,” Forster replied ruefully. He meant, of course, a living mother, to be shocked…

In the post-apocalyptic diseasescape of the new dramatic thriller “The Last of Us,” on HBO, survivors are offered the choice between a regimented existence in scattered quarantine zones under a repressive police state and near-certain death beyond their borders. Inside the government’s densely patrolled walls, it’s believed that only the nihilistic sort—slavers, marauders, terrorists—would risk infection by the creatures that wiped out civilization two decades ago: mutated parasitic fungi called cordyceps, which hijack their human hosts and turn them into zombies. The infected, who slowly hybridize with the parasites to become more impervious, may well be ineradicable as a species. When the mutation is first discovered, in Jakarta, a petrified mycologist advises, “Bomb this city and everyone in it.” Cities were shelled in an effort to stamp out the cordyceps,…

JANUARY 18 – 24, 2023 Deeply spiritual and kinesthetically invigorating, the dances of Ronald K. Brown tend not to be politically explicit. But “The Equality of Night and Day”—performed at the Joyce, Jan. 17-22, by Ronald K. Brown/EVIDENCE (Demetrius Burns, a member of the company, appears above)—is partially set to speeches by Angela Davis. A score by the jazz pianist Jason Moran threads the activist content with a subdued ritual of grief. For balance, Brown’s “Open Door,” with live accompaniment by the Afro Latin Jazz Ensemble, offers joy. As ever, it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. ART Nick Cave This Chicago-based artist achieves a paradoxical tone of elegiac flamboyance in his work, confronting the spectre of anti-Black brutality with glittering feats of assemblage and couturier-level craft. “Forothermore,”…

On a chilly Monday afternoon, in Washington Square Park, Jerome Peel wheeled a bike up to some stairs near the Giuseppe Garibaldi statue. “This is where we’re gonna set up,” he said. A friend plopped a portable plywood ramp on the ground. “This is scary, but I think it should fly right up,” Peel said. He turned to another friend: “James, are you comfortable with me jumping over you?” A shaggy-haired skateboarder named James Hernandez said, “I trust you, for some reason.” Hernandez sat on the ground behind the ramp. Nearby, two guys selling weed watched as Peel raced up the ramp and soared into the air, over Hernandez, and past the stairs, skidding on the concrete and almost crashing into a fence that was protecting the lawn. “Oh, shit!”…

In the early hours of February 24, 2019, a seventeen-foot-long fishing boat entered a narrow coastal inlet near Beaufort, South Carolina. It was foggy, the passengers were navigating with a flashlight, and they had been drinking all evening. At around 2:30 a.m., a bridge loomed up in the dark, and the boat hit pilings before running up the nearest bank, with a gashed hull. Three of the six people on board, all young adults, were thrown into the icy water. Two resurfaced, but there was no sign of the third, a nineteen-year-old named Mallory Beach. Her body was found a week later, in a marsh a few miles away. There was some uncertainty at first about who was steering the boat at the moment of impact, but it was known…

For the very rich, private wealth managers are in a separate class from other retainers, even from the trusted pilots, chefs, and attendants who maintain their life styles. Guarding the capital—the “corpus,” as it’s known in the business—puts you in contact with a family’s most closely held secrets. Managers handle delicate tasks; one professional in the Cayman Islands described the sensitivity of making a financial plan for an out-of-wedlock child that “has to be kept totally private from the wife.” Others specialize in keeping clients out of the news by minimizing public transactions. The most devoted liken themselves to clergy or consiglieri, and tend to get prime seats at the kids’ weddings and the patriarch’s deathbed. Marlena Sonn entered the wealth-management industry in 2010, and found a niche working with…

The difficulty with waiting, Rosalie thought, is that one can rarely wait in absolute stillness. Absolute stillness?—that part of herself, which was in the habit of questioning her own thoughts as they occurred, raised a mental eyebrow. No one waits in absolute stillness; absolute stillness is death; and when you’re dead you no longer wait for anything. No, not death, Rosalie clarified, but stillness, like hibernation or estivation, waiting for … Before she could embellish the thought with some garden-variety clichés, the monitor nearby rolled out a schedule change: the 11:35 train to Brussels Midi was cancelled. All morning, Rosalie had been migrating between platforms in Amsterdam Centraal, from Track 4 to Track 10 then to Track 7 to Track 11 and back to 4. The trains to Brussels, both…

Of the character sketches that the English satirist Samuel Butler wrote in the mid-seventeenth century—among them “A Degenerate Noble,” “A Huffing Courtier,” “A Small Poet,” and “A Romance Writer”—the most recognizable today is “A Modern Critic.” He is a contemptible creature: a tyrant, a pedant, a crackpot, and a snob; “a very ungentle Reader”; “a Corrector of the Press gratis”; “a Committee-Man in the Commonwealth of letters”; “a Mountebank, that is always quacking of the infirm and diseased Parts of Books.” He judges, and, if authors are to be believed, he judges poorly. He praises without discernment. He invents faults when he cannot find any. Beholden to no authority, obeying nothing but the mysterious stirrings of his heart and his mind, he hands out dunce caps and placards insolently and…

American Caliph, by Shahan Mufti (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). In March, 1977, a Black Muslim organization, the Hanafis, seized three buildings in Washington, D.C., taking more than a hundred hostages. Their leader, Hamaas Abdul Khaalis, had two demands: that he be allowed to “carry out Allah’s justice” on Nation of Islam members who killed his family, and that a bio-pic of the Prophet Muhammad be banned. This history adeptly weaves together narratives of the hostage negotiations, of feuding American Islamic groups, and of Khaalis’s life, which was shaped by race, theology, and the faulty “machinery of American justice.” Mufti observes, “Khaalis may have been acting under the Islamic title ‘khalifa,’ but he, and his actions, were, above all, American.” Dinner with Joseph Johnson, by Daisy Hay (Princeton). From the seventeen-seventies…